Dodge City Times

Our Little World.
Some physical results of the Java disturbance help us to understand how small the world is. Take a bowl of water, agitate the fluid in the center, and the undulations you excite propagate themselves in smooth-swelling concentric rings till they lap against the side of the bowl. There they break, and slop up in mimic tidal waves. This is an exact illustration—magna componere parvis—of the oscillations of the sea reported from both hemispheres this week. The tidal irregularities, as might be expected, were most violent on the northwestern seaboard of Australia, which lies right opposite the scene of the Java disturbances. On that coast the sea retreated and advanced a hundred yards. A day or two later oscillations appeared on the Atlantic seaboard of America. The particular undulation which, on the fifth day out, slopped up on the east coast of New Zealand must have come by way of Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, and had nearly completed the circle of the globe. Australia lies as a breakwater between us and Java by the direct route. It gives one a new conception of the littleness of what Henry Ward Beecher calls "this fi'penny-ha' penny world," when a man can stand on the ocean-beach at Dunedin and watch the ripples from a splash made in the Straits of Sunda.—Otago Times.